Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday October 10, 2013 @09:51AM
from the this-will-really-dent-exchange-student-applications dept.

An anonymous reader writes with a link to The Huffington Post, which reports "that a Saudi man was sentenced to 2,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for dancing naked on the roof of a car and posting the video online, according to multiple reports. Three other men were also sentenced to three to seven years in jail and hundreds of lashes each for the incident, Agence France-Presse reported, citing Arabic-language paper Al-Sharq. The four men were hit with a number of charges, including "encouraging vice" and violating public morality, according to the report. The prosecutor in the case, which was heard by a judge in Saudi Arabia's conservative Al-Qassem province, reportedly objected to the sentences for being "too lenient," Gulf News notes. The video was reportedly circulated widely on the Internet, but could not be found by The Huffington Post."

I get that they have oil, but come on already. This sort of crap should simply not be tolerated by the west. We should not sell them arms or have diplomatic relations with these kinds of states. They abuse women, have a cave man's idea of a criminal justice system, are a theocracy and fund terrorism. What else do they need to do before we decide to stop tolerating their shit?

Oh come on. Is it Muslims that are suing the Kansas Board of Schools for teaching evolution in classes ? Is it Muslims that enacted abortion laws that require medical rape with a sonar to make women feel more guilty for doing it ?

You've got enough brain-dead biggots in your country to make it as bad any backwards theocracy.

Eh, it's still an extreme comparison. This is a person who is having their life ruined, suffering literal torture, and all for the sake of one interpretation of one book.

I don't think Christianity is an accurate understanding of the universe, and I don't think it's even close to an ideal approach to morality, but comparing people who are afraid of learning something to those who torture and imprison others on the basis of their religion isn't fair.

But whatever politicians may have been saying, AFAICT, we didn't, in fact, get any sweetheart deals on oil from Iraq. Perhaps we kept Hussein from cutting us off, but I don't see any evidence he was going to do that.

I think it's entirely fair. The only difference between these two groups is the book they've chosen. It took a lot of work and loss of life to chill the Christians down to a point where they are almost tolerable, but they have everything they need to become (again) what the Muslims are today.

I think it's entirely fair. The only difference between these two groups is the book they've chosen.

Nope, the difference, as can be seen throughout the world, is poverty. Cultures with a lot of poverty take an extreme approach to enforcing morality. Christians still execute gay people in Uganda. Turkey is a mostly Muslim country without these kinds of extreme civil rights abuses.

It took a lot of work and loss of life to chill the Christians down to a point where they are almost tolerable, but they have everything they need to become (again) what the Muslims are today.

Book: Acts. Chapter 5. Ananias converted to Christianity and was told to sell all his posessions and give all the money to the commune. Instead, he gave only half the money, and kept the other half.

A priest asked him about this, and he lied and said "I gave all the money." In punishment, God instantly killed him then and there. The same thing happened to his wife shortly thereafter.

What happened to all the forgiveness and compassion?

This is a major problem with the Bible: it presents a very inconsistent image of God. Sometimes he is over-the-top forgiving, and other times he is over-the-top brutal in punishment. There is a distinct lack of consistency, leaving his followers to wonder when their best efforts at pleasing Him will just make Him go irate again.

"Mysterious ways" does not capture it. "Sociopathic ways" is more accurate. I really, really hope the Bible is not accurate in its description of God.

Oh for fucks sake please stop engaging in such false equivalencies. I know you appended the smiley in an effort to make a joke of this, and this isn't aimed at you personally. Far too many people really think it isn't that bad, and we shouldn't say anything because we're not perfect either, and your post (meant in jest or not) feeds into that notion.

The United States may have put an inexperienced African-American in office ahead of a vastly more qualified female, but our gender (and other issues) are miniscule compared to how women are treated in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other places.

* Women are routinely murdered for stepping out of line, in despicable, dishonorable acts referred to by their perpetrators as "honor killings."* Women who offend the sensibilities of the men of their family are often locked up for life in a room with no light, no sound, and no outside contact beyond a tray of food being shoved under a door, a practice that makes solitary confinement in the US and other western states look like a picnic in comparison. The result is almost universal madness on the part of the victim, usually within a relatively short time. This practice is so common and entrenched that there is a term for this facility, the "woman's room" (not to be confused with a restroom or loo)* victims of rape are routinely charged and convicted of fornication, adultery, etc. for having the audacity of being a victim, and imprisoned or worse (see above). Worse, they are convicted merely on the word of a few men, while female testimony is dismissed (by law) and not considered as a counterweight. In many places, they are stoned to death.* Even women who manage to escape all of this and are considered "upstanding" by the psychotic standards of the culture can, at best, expect to be buried in the desert with no record of their passing (no marker, no death record, nothing). This after a life in servitude and bondage.* Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to leave the house without the company of a man, even if the man is a boy-child.* Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive, on pain of severe punushment.

and the list goes on. Women drowned in front of their entire families in the family swimming pool. Women disfigured by acid for refusing the advances of a suiter, and so on and so on, ad nauseum.

People should read the book "Princess" [amazon.com] by Jean Sasson, about the nightmare of being a Saudi Princess, arguably the most privileged and sheltered position a woman can occupy in that society. There are also several excellent, Iranian-made movies that depict, describe, and criticize the epidemic of female-stonings in that society, often with little or no evidence beyond the word of a husband keen to ditch his wife for a prettier woman, e.g. The Stoning of Soraya M [wikipedia.org].

It's appalling, and we in the west have betrayed everything we purport to stand for, year after year and decade after decade, by cozying up to such regimes and abusive societies.

That was stated only to appease those who rightfully said a war would cost too much. Any idiot knows, after the Gulf War "War for Oil", it would have been politically disastrous to take oil from Iraq in payment.

We might have a ways to go before women and men are on equal footing in America, but we're light-years ahead of Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, a woman can't drive a car. She can't vote. She can't even go outside without a male relative tagging along to "supervise" her. This last one strikes me as closer to how you'd treat a pet (sans leash) or a child than an adult human being. In America, a woman might not get the same salary a man does - and that should definitely be fixed - but she can drive to work without any male relative after voting in any election she wants to and nobody thinks that's out of the ordinary.

As far as abuse goes, yes women get abused by private individuals but the justice system for the most part punishes those people. No, it's not perfect and abusers sometimes go unpunished, but a woman reporting abuse in Saudi Arabia would likely get punished for being a "troublesome female" instead of the abuser being punished.

No, the real issue is moralizers enforcing their twisted sense morality with violence. That's the only reason dancing naked is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and the only reason Cannabis is prohibited in the US. The two laws are exactly analogous.

[1]: The main reason the US's murder rate is so high is the availability of firearms.

Switzerland has just as many guns and far less murders. Mexico has less and far more murders.

Realistically the US's murder rate is heavily influenced by many cultural factors and has a lot to do with gang and drug related violence. When you take those out the US isn't all that different. Plus while actual murders are higher in the US if you look at other violent crime (rape, muggings, etc) the US is ahead of many European countries.

Overall this issue is far more complex than the simple minded "Guns are bad, mmmkay." response.

What you refer to is leader worship and/or state worship. Usually some sort of Fascism though often with the label Socialism. These can indeed be as ugly as any religion, but they are very much like religion. Such totalitarian states have claimed Atheism simply as a way to shut down competing religions. i.e., worship Stalin/Mao/etc., not God.

Well, or else Peter and his cronies knew he was holding back, so they grabbed him and tortured him until he coughed up the dough and then killed him, then later his wife came in so they killed her too, and then they carried the bodies out and piously said "Look what GOD does to people that hold out on us when they join up". That actually explains all of the supposed facts (assuming that "Luke" got them right in the first place) and hey, it doesn't require anything supernatural!

To put it another way, if you pulled that stunt today: Two people walk into a house where you and some burly young associates are sitting, and a short while later you carry out two dead bodies and explain to the crowd how all of the money that was in their pockets (a substantial sum, since they supposedly sold everything) is really your money -- I mean "God's" money, but you just happen to be his treasurer -- and God struck the two people down because they changed their mind about giving it all over, do you really think that any jury in the world would buy the "God did it" defense? Of course not. Because, in fact, we've never seen anybody ever get struck down by God, not even when they did things like fill entire warehouse sized buildings with men, women, children and bars of fake soap and then filled the buildings with cyanide and burned the bodies, or kidnapped, raped, killed, and ate children, or enslaved entire populations. In fact, we have really good evidence that you can commit any sin you want and while humans may not like it, not one single thing will happen to you because of God not liking it.

That's the reason Christians invented the whole "heaven/hell" thing. Since there is very, very visibly no such thing as cosmic justice in our real lives in the real world, they needed an entire infinite posthumous existence where one could be rewarded or punished to be able to argue that a just God exists at all.

If God truly disliked hypocrites, would one single member of congress be out there not yet struck dead, or blinded, or maimed, or enslaved or raped or tortured (because God loves slavery -- it says so right there in the Bible, just like God approves of marriage by rape plus 50 shekels)? I don't think so. If God punished religious liars, would all of the members of the Catholic priesthood who raped small boys and went on to live their entire lives receiving the communion -- often enough from the very hands of those that were aware of their crimes -- and doing other religious stuff not have had their equipment blasted off by a lightning bolt the first time they reached for an innocent? How is it that so many Christians simultaneously oppose abortion and favor the death penalty and support the idea of a just war without being swallowed up by a pit? I don't think you can assert that God opposes hypocrisy at all. God, after all, is a hypocrite, ten times over, according to the many, many contradictions in the infallible bible.

No, Atheists do not believe that there is a God. Or, to be more precise still, they do not find any convincing evidence that there is a God, any more than there is convincing evidence of pink unicorns. Their default state of belief for the infinity of possible assertions that are unsupported by sound evidence is "lack", not "faith". They don't have faith that there is no God -- that would require positive evidence of a negative statement, as they say in the inference business, lack of evidence is not positive evidence of lack. Humans in the West had little evidence that black swans existed (and hence didn't much believe in them) until they did and then they did. Black swans existed just fine without humans having "faith" that they did, and people who didn't believe in them when nobody they knew or heard of had ever seen one didn't have "faith" that they did NOT exist, they just had no reason to think that they did.

Atheists do have to spend a fair bit of time shooting holes in the mish-mosh of hearsay from the dark ages that passes for conclusive evidence in the minds of the religious, just like good scientists have to spend a fair bit of time shooting holes in weak evidence from poorly done studies in many other contexts. Scientists don't "have faith that the magnetic monopole doesn't exist" just because nobody has (yet) credibly seen one, any more than they had faith that the Higgs boson didn't exist before someone allegedly saw a few at the LHC. They just weren't convinced by the evidence and arguments so far that they do exist.

So actually, many Atheists are both rational and faithless and are neither ignorant nor idiots. Since they would consider the word "agnostic" to mean "lacking knowledge of" (because that's what it means, and their not idiots or ignorant) they could probably care less if you called them "agnostic about God", except for the weak connotation of agnostic that suggests that the proposition involved is somehow reasonable. I'm agnostic about monopoles because I find them reasonable, but don't believe in them (yet) due to a lack of evidence. I'm not exactly agnostic about pink unicorns that love to lay their heads in the laps of virgins and can cure disease with their horns -- yes, there's a lack of evidence but the proposition isn't particularly reasonable -- it is inconsistent with a lot of things I believe more strongly because there is a lot of evidence.

An atheist might well not consider themselves to be an agnostic because they think that at the very least, most descriptions of God are horribly inconsistent, often logically contradictory, sometimes ethically contradictory, and arguments about evidence concerning God are an excellent opportunity to play "Logical Fallacy Bingo". So they often, but not always, are not the sort of thing one can properly be said to feel "agnostic" about. But at the end of the day, show me a pink unicorn healing virgin amputees with a touch of its horn, and after I've taken a dose or two of anti-psychotic medication (just in case somebody slipped me some LSD in my coffee) I will reluctantly increase my degree of belief in them.

In the meantime, perhaps you might avoid making sweeping, incorrect statements about atheism, which is lack of belief in god, not active belief that no god exists, and certainly does not involve faith in any of the many reasonable meanings of the word.